I’d been wondering why no-one was commenting on anything. At all.

It turns out that our template had comments disabled for some reason. We’ve reverted to an older template and restored the comments boxes.

Please now go back to your favorite or most frustrating posts of the past month and comment away!

…smells just as sweet. Time Magazine describes “A More Intimate Sabbath“:

Zachary Thacher often spends Friday nights at home in his New York City apartment, but not because he’s skipping out on Sabbath-eve prayer services. Thacher, 32, is the founder of Kol haKfar, an independent Jewish community that, like a growing number of similar groups around the country, meets in the homes of community participants. Thacher says he started his group–which now has a Friday-eve attendance of about 25–because “having a meaningful, personal service just didn’t seem possible in the harsh lighting and monotonous, institutional vibe of a synagogue.”

Like Kol haKfar, many of the new communities thriving in cities across the U.S. are run by volunteers–with a healthy representation in their 20s and 30s–and offer religious services organized almost exclusively by e-mail. The groups tend to avoid denominational classification.

Hat tip: Mah Rabu.

S3K Leadership Network member Rabbi Ed Feinstein, interviewed in The Jewish Journal Of Greater Los Angeles:

The Journal’s Amy Klein: : You gave a sermon on Yom Kippur outlining your vision for the synagogue. Can you sum it up?

Rabbi Ed Feinstein: America gives us many gifts: freedom, security, hope. But there"re two huge holes in American culture. One, it"s very individualistic, and therefore lonely. And two, American culture doesn"t provide a sense of the purpose for living. And these happen to be the two things that Judaism does best. It connects us with each other into community. And it reminds us that we live for each other and with each other and provides a sense of purposeful living.

Guilt & Pleasure Quarterly’s Mireille Silcoff:

In the last couple of years, a lot of Jewish institutions have approached me, asking how they could get more young people through their doors. I have been asked: “what should we do with our youth programming?” I tell them I am not sure about anything other than the fact that no red-blooded youth likes being “programmed” to.

…Stop blowing so much effort and money on programs that exist with the sole aim of making Jews meet and marry and have babies with other Jews. These programs don’t work. A twenty-two year old can sniff a matchmaking event wrapped up as a hip hop block party a mile away. If all that time and effort was put towards cultural creation rather than this trial at demographic preservation, I think more youths might get engaged.

Blogs of Zion’s Ariel Beery:

I think one of the major factors contributing to the splintering of the Jewish community and the resultant self-isolation of the denominationally affiliated youth is the focus many Jewish organizations put on ‘continuity" instead of on enrichment. By focusing on continuity, Jewish organizations invest the majority of their time and capital reaching out to the unaffiliated through attractively packaged programming, working on the assumption that those already committed in one way or another to Judaism have already been won over. In doing so, the Jewish world paradoxically provides incentives for non-affiliation with specific communities—hence the ever-growing amount of “hipster” projects funded by institutional organizations—leaving those affiliated youths without the resources they need to further develop their communities.

(Original version here.)

Hat tips to Mobius and shamirpower, both at Jewschool.

S3K Leadership Network member Rabbi Andy Bachman has contributed to Radical Torah, an excellent new group blog on the parashat hashavuah (Torah portion of the week). Andy challenges us “to formulate as relevant a message for the current generation as its pop culture heroes”:

Comedy has not only always spoken truth to power, but power has been forced to listen because the people laugh.

The honest question we have to ask ourselves is: Will our message be as relevant?

With this post, Synablog welcomes contributor Rabbi Daniel Zemel of Temple Micah in Washington, DC. Rabbi Zemel is a member of the S3K Leadership Network Working Group on Spiritual Leadership.

It is time to end “Mitzvah Days” for the many “mis-lessons” that they teach. We all know what Mitzvah Day is– that great initiative of many congregations around the country to organize large segments of their communities on a particular Sunday to go out and perform community service– paint houses, serve meals, clean up parks, visit hospitals, perform at nursing homes- the list goes on.

For Jews, every day is Mitzvah Day from the moment we wake up in the morning and say “Modeh ani…” to the moment we recite “Sh"ma…” as we turn off the lights. This is or should be the primary lesson of all Jewish education. Mitzvah is the way we engage the world. Mitzvah is the way we strive for holiness. Mitzvah is the power behind tikkun. Mitzvah is what infuses every moment with sacred possibility. What is called “Mitzvah Day” might more properly be called “Good Deed Day” because that, in fact, is what it actually is. Mitzvah is the language of obligation. “Mitzvah Day” is an American Jewish slogan.

How much energy goes into planning and organizing Mitzvah Day? How many person hours go into pulling off such an event? How many phone calls, committee meetings, flyers, announcements, appointments, e-mail messages? All of this simply serves to point up the scope of the problem. Mitzvah Day is an event, but as an event it cannot lead to a lifestyle, merely anticipation of more events.

There are other questions to at least think about when considering Mitzvah Day: Does Mitzvah Day feed a culture where “doing the good” actually becomes “making me feel good?”Have we become so good at social action that we neglect the essential Jewish demand for pursuing social justice? Mitzvah Day is simply another program that deflects attention, time and energy from the larger picture of building Jewish communities and Jewish life on a mitzvah foundation.

When our synagogues are stages from which we launch programs, we present Judaism as an event to attend rather than a lifestyle to live and pursue. Rabbis need to be teachers and role models trumpeting a compelling prophetic vision for a better world and not merely program organizers content with “Jewish activity.” Let"s end Mitzvah Day and take the next step– to create Jewish living inspired by a Jewish call to social justice every day.

While the New York Times covers Reform efforts to encourage conversion in an article featuring S2K alum Rabbi Jeff Sirkman and the Larchmont Temple, Great Britain’s Rabbi Jonathan Romain makes a trenchant observation:

There is an even earlier stage of letting potential converts know we are receptive to them. Look at any synagogue newsletter and you will notice dozens of activities listed, but almost never a conversion class. What message do we send by hiding such classes away like a shop item never on display but available under the counter on request? How do we expect potential converts to find them?

S3K Leadership Network member Rabbi Yosef Kanefsky appears in this week’s Jewish Journal Tu b’Shevat story:

For most Orthodox synagogues, environmental activism is comparatively new. Canfei Nesharim (the wings of eagles), the first and perhaps only Orthodox environmental organization, was launched on Tu b"Shevat 2003.

…Among Orthodox congregations reacting favorably to Canfei Nesharim"s message is B"nai David-Judea Congregation in Los Angeles, which is moving discussion about environmental issues from back to front burner, said Rabbi Yosef Kanefsky.

“While Canfei Nesharim"s emphasis is on study, I would like B"nai David"s emphasis to be on action,” said Kanefsky, who is especially concerned about the impact of “carbon footprints,” referring to the effect that human activities have on the environment, measured in units of carbon dioxide.

Google alerts are funny: when I first received this a few minutes ago, I thought it was for this year (5766). Two S3K Leadership Network members in two weeks, I thought; not bad!

But it’s not new — it’s from last year. Yet Google sent it to me tonight, and it even got the right parshah, right on time: B’shalach. And the drash is all about memory.

So it’s worth re-reading S3K Leadership Network member Rabbi Sharon Brous’s Torah commentary in The Jewish Journal Of Greater Los Angeles. She concludes,

We revisit the darkness in order to remember the suffering. We remind ourselves to not change the channel when we see grueling images of destruction in far away places. We know what it feels like to be raw and real, and to have a sense of urgency. We know how to be present in the face of pain: ours and others. That"s what it means to see through the black part of the eye — the darkness gives us a clarity we wouldn"t otherwise have.

But we must be careful neither to romanticize, nor to become paralyzed by the darkness. Our story is one of redemption, so, like Moses, we must faithfully march out of Egypt, carrying on our shoulders the very symbol of the descent into darkness. It"s not enough to be present to the darkness, to dwell in the images and the stories of human suffering. Our responsibility is to gather up the pieces and begin to ascend.

In the aftermath of a catastrophe that has redefined the geographical and theological landscape of our generation, we must make space in our hearts to remember our experience in Egypt so that we can truly identify with the pain of those suffering so greatly. But then we must fight to reverse the course of the descent with courage, commitment and compassion, refusing to leave anyone behind in the darkness.

It took me a few moments to remember what she meant by “a catastrophe that has redefined the geographical and theological landscape of our generation.” Fortunately, others (elu ve-elu) are not so quick to forget….

[And in case you're looking for this year's JJ commentary on B'shalach, click here for Rabbi Toba August's reflection on Shabbat Shirah.]

S3K Leadership Network member Liz Lerman recently premiered her latest dance, “Ferocious Beauty: Genome.” As the New York Times review, “Connecting Bodies, Apples and DNA Through Dance,” points out, “Ms. Lerman has been addressing unlikely, increasingly complex themes for 30 years. But she is still at her best when focusing on microcosmic individual stories”:

The light dims. Video of a small woman moving on spiky steel crutches crowds out projections of globelike apples. The woman, Suzanne Richard, enters the stage in a wheelchair. A hugely, defiantly expressive presence on her own and in the video close-ups of her upper body, Ms. Richard takes a boldly active part in the evocative dance with able-bodied performers that follows. Then, quietly, Ms. [Martha] Wittman appears, musing aloud about the perfect, tasteless supermarket apples of today. “No more tart surprises,” she wistfully murmurs.

“Ferocious Beauty” and its production elements — Michael Mazzola’s lighting, Darron L. West’s soundscape and Logan Kibens’s video and effects editing — are likely to settle into a clearer whole with repeated performances, and the choreography and the verbal and visual material may meld more completely. But in that single remark about apples and in the way she, Ms. Wittman and Ms. Richard arrive there in that simple, powerful segment, Ms. Lerman makes an irrefutable case for the place of perceived biological imperfection in the span of human genetics. Her argument has nothing to do with ethics. And it is a case that could be made only by an artist.

[UPDATE, 2/9/06: More background information is available here.]